A richly imagined, futuristic stand-alone with appeal to gamers, SF fans, and armchair futurists alike.
A near-future hacker in a digitally enhanced city runs afoul of dangerous adversaries when he steals a unique prize.
The cyberpunk ethos has been endlessly consumed and reimagined by writers since dystopian domains like Blade Runner and writers like William Gibson and Bruce Sterling captured the popular imagination. While this techno-thriller suits that company, White (Static Ruin, 2018, etc.) has admirably built a self-contained world with hard rules and real-world analogues that fit comfortably alongside robot dogs, 3-D–printed guns, and an addictive online galactic battleground called Voidwar permanently displayed in the skies above. The setting is Neo Songdo, a virtual and augmented reality–studded metropolis somewhere in Korea. Our entry here is Julius “JD” Dax, an online repo man and adept real-world thief who toils as a mechanic to earn money to fix his blown-out knee. His plans go awry when Soo-Hyun, his cryptic stepsibling, asks him to steal a virus from the home of an isolated billionaire named Zero Lee on behalf of her creepy mentor, Kali Magdalene. So this three-act arc kicks off with a complicated heist, as JD and his crew bob and weave to steal the MacGuffin—during the World Cup final, no less. The second act extends a new player in Enda Hyldal, a brutal ex-soldier–turned–private eye, who is blackmailed by Lee’s company to retrieve JD’s ill-gotten prize. This is the chase, complete with Bourne-esque close combat, action-packed set pieces, and gun fights. The denouement arrives in the third act as JD finds that his loot is not a virus and we finally discover who’s been whispering to us during in-person interludes that foreshadow a radical new player in this dangerous game. White hasn’t reinvented the wheel, but it’s fun to read and more relevant to the present day than similar works in the canon, combining plausible technology with that age-old question of what it means to be human.
A richly imagined, futuristic stand-alone with appeal to gamers, SF fans, and armchair futurists alike.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21872-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: Jan. 26, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.
A man walks out of a bar and his life becomes a kaleidoscope of altered states in this science-fiction thriller.
Crouch opens on a family in a warm, resonant domestic moment with three well-developed characters. At home in Chicago’s Logan Square, Jason Dessen dices an onion while his wife, Daniela, sips wine and chats on the phone. Their son, Charlie, an appealing 15-year-old, sketches on a pad. Still, an undertone of regret hovers over the couple, a preoccupation with roads not taken, a theme the book will literally explore, in multifarious ways. To start, both Jason and Daniela abandoned careers that might have soared, Jason as a physicist, Daniela as an artist. When Charlie was born, he suffered a major illness. Jason was forced to abandon promising research to teach undergraduates at a small college. Daniela turned from having gallery shows to teaching private art lessons to middle school students. On this bracing October evening, Jason visits a local bar to pay homage to Ryan Holder, a former college roommate who just received a major award for his work in neuroscience, an honor that rankles Jason, who, Ryan says, gave up on his career. Smarting from the comment, Jason suffers “a sucker punch” as he heads home that leaves him “standing on the precipice.” From behind Jason, a man with a “ghost white” face, “red, pursed lips," and "horrifying eyes” points a gun at Jason and forces him to drive an SUV, following preset navigational directions. At their destination, the abductor forces Jason to strip naked, beats him, then leads him into a vast, abandoned power plant. Here, Jason meets men and women who insist they want to help him. Attempting to escape, Jason opens a door that leads him into a series of dark, strange, yet eerily familiar encounters that sometimes strain credibility, especially in the tale's final moments.
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.Pub Date: July 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-90422-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
PROFILES
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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